Shoes

Sometimes I like to just write and let it be, without editing a piece to death. It makes me feel free to let a something out and let it live, even with flaws it might have. I wrote this a few minutes ago. I will not edit it.

The photograph’s rounded corners and grainy image reminded her how long ago it had been taken, along with its unnatural hue, as if covered with a golden film.

Her childhood face smiled back at her, dirty and smiling with more bangs than any person had any right to have. Her corduroy cover-alls were smeared in mud, her feet buried in it.

She wasn’t sure if she actually remembered that day, or just the memories of trying to remember it, photos for fuel.

In the stories Mom always told about it, the mud was secondary, inconsequential. It was those shoes.

They’d left them on the car, and then drove away.

Mom laughed when she recounted how distraught her little daughter had been at the loss of the shoes she’d nearly grown out of. The silliness of children.

The pain of losing the shoes reflected back to her through the years, like two mirrors facing each other, compounding as it stretched through time. The details were lost to her, but the loss was fresh.

Silly, indeed, to still be missing those shoes all these years later. A day of realization, a peek at the cruelty of accident and chance. A turning point, to learn Mother was falliable, that dear things are sometimes suddenly gone.

Slipping the old photo back into the album in her mother’s closet, she wiped the tears from her eyes, flattened the wrinkles out the bodice of her black dress and headed back to the guests downstairs.



Vocabulary Word of the Day:
MERCURIAL - adj. - Quick and changeable in temperament; volatile